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Connecting two LAN's

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by voldar

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Hi everybody,

My company has two locations and I created two different LAN's based on W2K server coresponding to each location. Now, we decided to join the two LAN's. On each location I have AD, DNS, WINS and DHCP.
LAN 1 is mycompany.som - TCP/IP range: 192.168.1.1/254
LAN 2 is location.mycompany.som - TCP/IP range: 192.168.2.1/254

I connected the two LAN's by creating a tunelling in internet, both LAN's connect one two the other but only if I use TCP/IP, meaning user can see from a location to another by accessing \\tcp/ip address.

The problem is: what can I do (set the trust relationship between the two domains, DNS, DNS records or anything else) so that the computers from both LAN's see eachother by accessing the names and not the IP addresses. I am looking forward for any sugestions you may have.

10 replies

by mshavrov

The short answer is WINS.

If you have locations separated by router (in your case 2 routers, you are unable to transfer NetBIOS traffic between sites because this type of traffic relies on broadcasts and is stripped by routers.

So, what you can do:

1. Install WINS service in both locations (why in both? because you have relatively slow link and you don't want to have it congested with not-critical traffic). Since you have W2K Servers in each location, just install WINS server on each server and modify DHCP scope to propogate this settings to users.

2. Then you should build relations between WINS servers (configure second WINS server as partner with Pull policy). This will tell them to exchange information to each other.

3.Check your PCs if they have correct WINS settings (use "ipconfig /all" command). Then try to access remote PCs by name.

Good luck,

Michael Shavrov
MCSE+I, MCSE W2K, CCNP, CCDP, etc.

by hekkletekk

Since you can see from one to the other when you use the IP address, it is not - yet - a matter of Trusts to be resolved. That will set what resources (shares, etc) that can be accessed, who can do what to whom, etc.
This is most certainly a question of resolving the Host name to an IP address. You can do this a number of ways. If the number of PCs is small, you can create a HOSTS file, and copy it to each of the systems. Make sure this HOSTS file is named plain old HOSTS, with no extension -it can't be hosts.txt, for example. Create it in a text editor. It will be a list with two columns. On the left you will put the IP address. separated by at least one space, you next put the PC hosts name.
This only will work for statically assigned IP addresses. If you are using DHCP, it is more complex.
(I have to cut this off due to space limit. Look for the rest in another reply.)

by punderwood

Set-up DNS on each site and check that all local machines register themselves with their corresponding DNS server. Then set-up the DNS service to carry out a zone transfer, this way you replicate DNS info at both sites an dbe able to connect on name. As long as no DNS names overlap.

by ___._

Set up the DNS server from A to forward requests to the DNS server from B, and vice versa.

Create secondary zones on each domain for the other. The records from these updates will come from the other zone. Be sure to set-up the DNS servers to allow DNS forwarding and zone transfers for each.

Hope this helps

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